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Channel 4 has created a survey to capture as much feedback as possible from people who view their programming with captions (subtitles in the UK), audio description, signing on TV, or on the station’s on-demand service.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has published preliminary exemption orders for 34 channels provided on Telstra Pay TV for mobile phones. These include both free-to-air channels such as ABC1, and channels available on Foxtel.

On Global Accessibility Awareness Day, 19 May 2016, the New Zealand Captioning Working Group submitted a petition to Mojo Mathers, Green MP, with more than 2,300 signatures in a bid for the House of Representatives to legislate closed captioning across all relevant media.

Curtin University academic Katie Ellis will investigate disabled consumer experiences of subscription video-on-demand (VOD) services in Australia in her project ‘Accessing Video on Demand: A study of disability and streaming television’.

The trial of audio description on the ABC’s iview service is about to enter its third month, with feedback from viewers on the choice of programs and quality of the description being very positive.

Since the trial began in April, over 12,000 drama programs and over 5,000 factual programs have been played on iview with the audio description activated. The most popular drama program so far has been Poldark, and the most popular factual program The Killing Season.

The accessibility of video-on-demand (VOD) services is a hot topic in Australia, the UK and other countries at the moment. There have been calls for legislation to be introduced unless the VOD services make acceptable progress in introducing captions and audio description voluntarily. But what constitutes accessible progress? In the UK, the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), Action on Hearing Loss, and Sense (who represent people who are deafblind or have associated disabilities) have issued a report that attempts to answer that question.